I bit the bullet and agreed to pay $10 a month for the "premium" service at Spotify, now that they've quietly eliminated my ability to renew my "unlimited" service when my credit card expired. I guess the unlimited service has a way for me to load songs on a flash drive and use them in my car, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. It also allows me to play Spotify music on my WiFi radio, instead of being limited to Pandora.

I've never liked the search engine on Spotify, and a few months ago their new software eliminated my ability to display search results in alphabetical order. So, now it seems that the Spotify search engine is totally unable to search with any degree of specificity. I can put the name of a song, a performer, or an album, and then click for results. But I don't think I can specify to search for song titles only, or for a song by a certain performer.

Sometimes I'll search for a song and won't find it. Then I'll go to Amazon and search for the song and find the name of the album. Then I go back to Spotify and search for the album, and THEN I can find the song.

I've searched Spotify's forums, but haven't found any good search tips there. Can anybody help me find out how to navigate Spotify more effectively?

One of the core features of Spotify is searching. You just type the name of an artist or a song into the search bar and off you go. Normally that's all you need to get the Spotify experience: you know, when you think of some music and literally seconds later you're listening to it.

There are cases, though, when you need to refine your queries. Perhaps you don't want to search for "madonna", because you're not looking for the artist Madonna, but rather songs whose titles include the word "madonna". Then you can search for "title:madonna".

Similarly, you can search for "album:madonna" and "artist:madonna" to find only matching albums and artists, respectively.

To further refine your searches (or to indulge in some nostalgia or browse through a new musical genre), you can search for a year, a range of years or a genre: "year:1969", "year:1994-1996" or "genre:soul".

Logically, you can use combinations to search for techno from the early 90s or Grateful Dead songs from the late 60s: "genre:techno year:1990-1995" or "artist:"grateful dead" year:1965-1970". In the latter example, you see how you can use quotes to control to what parts of the search string a keyword applies.

Kyuss AND Green ? lists results with keywords 'Kyuss' and 'Green' Zeppelin OR Floyd -- lists results with keywords 'Zeppelin' or 'Floyd' Metallica NOT Anger ? lists all Metallica tracks except with the word 'Anger' Instead of using AND or NOT you can also use a plus sign (+) or a minus sign (-).

Further search options

genre: Displays music in the genre matching keyword. See the list of all genres, for example genre:blues, genre:"rock and roll". label: Displays music released by the label matching keyword. isrc: Displays tracks matching ID number according to the International Standard Recording Code. upc: Displays albums matching ID number according to the Universal Product Code. tag:new - Lists the most recently added albums. 'Tag' won't return results for any other keywords.

I was aware of all the problems Joe described in his first comment, but I hadn't discovered the solutions.

Yeah, it irks me too that you can no longer sort a list of songs. Used to be, you could not only list by title alphabetically, you could also sort by any other field, for example, timing. That was really useful when an artist recorded the same song several times. Just the other day I learned that Lead Belly recorded several versions of Rock Island Line. All of them appear on multiple albums. The easiest way to distinguish between them, without having to listen to them all, is to sort them by timing. Why would they take away a useful function like that?

I had discovered a few useful things. You can put a phrase in quotes. I had also discovered the minus sign. In other words, Spotify's search works a lot like Google's. But the rest is new to me.

I work with people who seem to feel it is an admission of failure or something to read a help file etc and that they should 'just know' things. Or that the software should be so written that it will know exactly what they mean and return exactly what they want.

It's not unreasonable to ask people to do a little homework is it, to get the best out?

I recently went back to improving my Photoshop skills. Without the manual and help I would only skim the surface.

Not to be critical of you, Joe, but generally I have never understood how people couldn't find things on the net. Even in AltaVista days it was possible!

Well, Nick, I humbly suggest that I have achieved a level of renown for my ability to find things on the Internet. So has Jim Dixon. I was pretty good at finding things on Spotify until a few months ago, when they changed the search engine without notice or explanation, evidently to make it "easy-to-use." As far as I can tell, Spotify has never posted anything about the quiet demise of their $4.99 "unlimited" service (that actually had some limitations). When I went to update my credit card information, they wouldn't accept it unless I upgraded to the "premium" service or downgraded to "free." So, my point is that Spotify is less informative than they ought to be. And if you want to contact them, good luck...

The procedures I posted above work fairly well, although they still produce incomplete results. My Amazon trick helps a lot, though. If I can't find a song on Spotify, I find it on Amazon to note what album it's on; and then I go back to Spotify to search for the album.

I use the free one and if I want to find something I put in the artist, colon and part of the title of the song - and bingo there it is.

Hasn't failed yet.

An example.

I bought an LP years ago by a band called Aardvark (it is bizarrely quite collectable though why an asking price of £250! . The only thing I can remember is that it had the word 'very' in the title. Type in aardvark : very and the track appears.

I made playlists for each of the chapters of the upcoming Rise Again Songbook, and I marked those playlists "public." How easy is it for people to find those playlists? Can I post the URLs for the playlists to make it easier for people to find them?

Joe, yes, on my android that link goes straight to your playlist(12 tracks?) as a web page. Then when I click on a track ...the spotify ap' opens and I can 'shuffle' play the playlist. I don't have a paid account.

On your web page I can see 12 of your public lists. On the ap', going to your page with a search, I can see... hundreds(?) :-)

I thought that was you, Freddy. I'm glad you're enjoying them. The original songlists are on the Website for the Rise Again Songbook, which should be published in August. The list has changed as time has gone on, and I've tried to change the Spotify playlists accordingly. I keep thinking there won't be any more changes in our list of songs, but we've made several changes this week. The book goes to press May 30, so I suppose that will carve the list in stone.

I like your playlist a lot, by the way. Can't say I like all the songs on my lists, but those were the ones the editors chose for the book. I'm the researcher. I joined the team late and didn't play a big part in selection of songs. They did take two or three I suggested, though - out of 1200.

~~~~~~~~~ warning - I am on a slow connection and spotify runs like treacle. It plays OK, mostly, but if I'm moving or sorting tracks it can sit for sometimes 60sec or more and without any little clock to tell you where it is up to.